Extracts from ‘Fast This Time – Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road’

(Viking, 2007)

The impossible romance of the three weeks in April continues to dominate the imagination when we think about Jack Kerouac. The original scroll version of On the Road is the key document in the history of one of the most enduringly popular and influential novels published in the last fifty years, and among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.

Here I trace a compositional and publication history of On the Road. The story is about work, ambition, and rejection, but it is also about transformation. These are the years in which Kerouac transforms himself from a promising young novelist into the most successfully experimental writer of his generation. The key texts in this story are the original scroll version of On the Road, and Visions of Cody, which Kerouac began in the fall of the year in which he wrote the scroll.

Because the scroll is the wildflower from which the magic garden of Visions of Cody grows, it is the pivotal text in the story of Jack Kerouac and his place in American literature (3).

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Long before his readings in Buddhism Kerouac was intuitively attempting to reconcile a worldview that saw his lived experience both as one made painfully meaningless by his hard-wired knowledge of mortality and as one to be celebrated in every detail and at every moment precisely because, as he writes in Visions of Cody, we are soon “all going to die.”

Kerouac escapes this encircling loss in the act of writing. To say what happened. To get it down before it is lost. To make mythology from your life and from the lives of your friends. This urgency pushes Kerouac to strip his writing of ‘made-up’ stories.

Life’s impermanence and the inevitability of suffering inform and motivate Kerouac’s heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world. What Allen Ginsberg called his “open heart” and Kerouac himself described as being “submissive to everything, open, listening” results in a body of fiction in which the representation of the magical nature of entrancing and life-affirming fleeting detail is the outstanding feature (16).

jack kerouac - on the road: the original scroll

Jack Kerouac, On the Road – The Original Scroll - A major literary event when it was published in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classic, edited by Howard Cunnell and including his acclaimed introduction: ‘Fast This Time – Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road.’

See also the On the Road App featuring: ‘An expert introduction to the story of the book by Beat scholar Howard Cunnell on Kerouac's writing process and the years leading up to publication.’